1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information providing apparatus, an advertisement delivery system, an information providing method, and an information providing program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, advertisement delivery through the Internet is actively performed in accordance with rapid spread of the Internet. There is advertisement delivery in which icons representing a company, a product, and the like are displayed at predetermined positions on a web page, and, in a case where such an icon is clicked, a transition to a web page of a corresponding advertiser is made. While the advertisement delivery of such a type is called a banner advertisement or an advertisement link, it may be simply referred to as “advertisement” in description presented here.
In such advertisement delivery, in order to improve the advertisement effect, a targeting delivery is performed in which user information such as tastes, sexes, ages, addresses, and occupations of users are registered in advance, and an advertisement corresponding to the user information is selectively delivered.
There is a case where user information used for the targeting delivery is provided from an information provider to an advertisement delivery provider. For example, a site provider providing a web site collects user information of users who have accessed the web sites. Then, the information provider provides the user information acquired from the site provider for the advertisement delivery provider. In the case of this example, the user information of users who have accessed the web site is provided from the information provider to the advertisement delivery provider regardless of the intentions of the users.
The provision of the user information for the advertisement delivery provider as described above may not be desired by some users, and there is a concern that problems of personal information, privacy, and the like may incur. Accordingly, a case may be considered in which a user requests the site provider of an access target site not to distribute the user information to the advertisement delivery provider. However, since there are a huge number of site providers, in a case where a user requests all the site providers not to distribute the user information, there is a problem in that user's operation burden increases.